Monday, June 29, 2015

At the playground on Sunday afternoon Mabel was taking her ease at one point on an odd, low cable-anchored swing-contraption when she observed another child and that child's grandmother playing ice-cream store very nearby. Mabel became almost hypnotised, and happily observed the ice-cream game as long as it lasted.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Late Sunday afternoon Mabel and I climbed the hill to the playground. Before anything else she wanted to demonstrate her current way of playing hopscotch..Mabel's hopscotch game has grown more ambitious since the last time she showed it to me. The new rules appeared to require more acrobatics.

When we took a cookie break under the arbor, a toddler came teetering up to stare. Mabel turned and asked the mother if her little child could have some cookie. The mother took a tiny piece for this barely-walking baby, and the baby was enthralled.

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Biblical paintings and drawings by William Blake (1757-1827) preserved at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The number of Blake's supporters was painfully small during his lifetime, but for the past hundred years (since the dawn of Modernism) the splendor of this artist has never been in general dispute.

Friday, June 26, 2015

appendix 15 (a) on adjectivesAdjectives are the handles of Being. Nouns name the world, adjectives let you get hold of the name and keep it from flying all over your mind like a pre-Socratic explanation of the cosmos. Air, for example, in Proust can be (adjectivally) gummy, flaked, squeezed, frayed, pressed or percolated in Book 1; powdery, crumbling, embalmed, distilled, scattered, liquid or volatilized in Book 2; woven or brittle in Book 3; congealed in Book 4; melted, glazed, unctuous, elastic, fermenting, contracted, distended in Book 5; solidified in Book 6; and there seems to be no air at all in Book 7.–fromThe Albertine Workout(2014) byAnne Carson

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Jean Mounet-Sully (1841-1916)
in the role of Hernani
photographed by NadarVictoria & Albert Museum

Why did nature give me over to this creature – don't call it my choice,I was ventured:
by some pure gravity of existence itself,
conspiracy of being!
We were fifteen.
It was Latin class, late spring, late afternoon, the passive periphrastic,
for some reason I turned in my seat
and there he was.
You know how they say a Zen butcher makes one correct cut and the whole ox
falls apart
like a puzzle. Yes a cliché

and I do not apologize because as I say I was not to blame, I was unshielded
in the face of existence
and existence depends on beauty.
In the end.
Existence will not stop
until it gets to beauty and then there follow all the consequences that lead to the end.
Useless to interpose analysis
or make contrafactual suggestions.Quid enim futurum fuit si. . . . What would have happened if, etc.
The Latin master's voice
went up and down on quiet waves. A passive periphrastic
may take the place of the imperfect or pluperfect subjunctive
in a contrary-to-fact condition.Adeo parata seditio fuitut Othonem rapturi fuerint, ni incerta noctis timuissent.
So advanced was the conspiracy
that they would have seized upon Otho, had they not feared the hazards of the night.
Why do I have
this sentence in mind
as if it happened three hours ago not thirty years!
Unshielded still, night now.
How true they were to fear its hazards.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

In 1759 the writer Denis Diderot was feeling old and discouraged. The year before, his much-censored, multi-volume Encyclopédie project had fallen into royal disfavor (through court intrigue, by none other than the Jesuits). Seven of the projected seventeen folio volumes had already been issued to subscribers and booksellers when publication was suddenly ordered to cease. Diderot felt that he could no longer risk publishing anything at all. For the next six years the syndicate behind the project kept him on the payroll for editing (and to a great extent writing) the remainder of the work – clandestinely. The backers continued to wager in favor of the day when the royal ban would be lifted. As, in time, it was.

Because of the scandal, Diderot lost friends as well as collaborators. His most trusted remaining ally in Paris was the German expatriate Friedrich Melchior Grimm, editor of the Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. This newsletter circulated only in manuscript and never to more than fifteen subscribers, all of them European rulers who could seldom or never enjoy personal access to Parisian high culture. Such an audience particularly valued the explicit frankness that caused trouble for Diderot elsewhere. Grimm's newsletter could employ him as an arts journalist because the entire enterprise was conducted privately and circulated by diplomatic couriers, immune to surveillance.

Monday, June 22, 2015

There was a happy Father's Day party yesterday at Mabel's house where I received two major gifts that I am installing this morning in the places where they will live.

Above on my desk blotter accompanied by local dragons are two views of the object Mabel made for me. It is MABEL MAGAZINE, with many pictures on the inside. The two pages visible are drawings named Daddy-Long-Leg and Falling-Zig-Zag.

And the other present (below) was a hummingbird feeder for outside the window of the new library. I mixed the nectar and hung it up just now.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

From several sources, paintings of surpassing facility by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). Like other French artists of the period, Fragonard formed his technique through extended periods of study in Italy – the placewhere educated Europeans were agreed that absolutely the finest paintings in existence could be emulated.

Jean-Honoré FragonardStudies of figures seen from below
18th centuryPhiladelphia Museum of Art

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."